OK. We are in the Galapagos Islands. Let's talk about creationism.
Darwin rather suffered at the hands of the creationists. Ironically, he actually held a very deep rooted Christian faith himself not only prior to his development of his theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest, but for quite some time after. He saw, as do I, no problem with the concept of evolution and the concept of a creator God existing together side by side. He did not necessarily see his own theory as somehow mutually exclusive with creationism. In the end, sadly, it was the vehemence and inflexibility of the faith of others, which shook his own. I have been in a similar position myself.
I am much of Darwin's opinion here. I have never been strongly against the theory of evolution on a faith basis. In fact I have never really understood the arguments that go on around this. If the world was designed by a God, is it not all the more beautiful if he, she or it built in the ability to adapt and evolve, effectively 'future proofing' it against the inevitable ravages of time?
Anyway, as it happens, evolution is not what I want to discuss in this blog. I want to consider the other question. The one nobody really talks about.
Assuming, as I do (and hypothetically speaking if you don't happen to believe this), that the universe was deliberately designed and brought into being by a creator/higher power/God, then how do we explain its defects?
Before you say 'Adam and Eve, obviously', give up on this blog and go to make a cup of coffee - let's just consider the ramifications.
Imagine the universe is some kind of artwork, and you've been to view it in a gallery. You see, as I did on Wednesday, the green blue sea stretched out for as far as the eye can see, whipped up into thousands of glittering white crystals in the wake of the boat transferring us from Floreana to Isabella island. You see enormous turtles, gracefully moving around in the water, as I did on Thursday, the green and yellow of their heads and fins glinting in the sunlight reflected in the water, seaweed waving on the bottom among speckled rocks dotted with small, bright fish. You watch sea lions, so lumbering and cumbersome outside the water, so graceful and sleek within it. You meet the eyes of enormous giant tortoises, moving slowly and ponderously, and eyeing you with a sort of lazy irritation. You feel the heat of the sun, the sting of the wind, the salt of the sea, the ever changing textures and colours of myriads of different plants. The individual beauty of the people around you. (Amy has a smattering of freckles on her pale skin and a bright, captivating smile, Toni's hair is a soft white blonde above a vivid face to match her strength and clever personality, Hank is tall and slim, with a mop of blonde hair and bright blue eyes, etc etc. (All pseudonyms) It is very easy to see the beauty in my group-mates).
My bet is that you'd be astounded and in awe. You would be desperate to meet the artist that created all this, to see what kind of a being could dream up all this splendour.
The trouble would come when you looked a little closer. The sea, so beautiful on the surface is treacherous and deep. What artist would create something which could kill a human with its strength, dash boats into pieces, lay waste to birds, fish, plants and people in one, overpowering tsunami? What kind of artist would design his work so that, in order to release pressure, the canvas would periodically separate, spewing out boiling sulphur, creating the huge crater we walked around on Wednesday, full of black burned out rocks, causing the giant tortoises we admired so much in this artist's palate, to flee and die in their hundreds? What kind of creator is it whose design for balanced natural processes includes so much blood and violent death, in which one creature must be the enemy of another, must consume other beings to survive long enough to be preyed upon itself? On Thursday I swam in an ocean heaving with life and death, and watched a shark the size of me swim gracefully only a metre or so beneath me, beautiful and blue and deadly. He won't attack me, (though I hear my breath quicken in my snorkel even as I marvel at how lucky I am to see him) because he has enough food here in the form of small fish and sea lions. Why would a creator make his world so fearsome? And what do natural systems which rely so heavily on mutual consumption, tell us about the character of such a creator?
Many Christians feel they have a simple answer to this question in the form of the story of Eden. The world was beautiful, but Adam and Eve's disobedience made it flawed. And thus is the pain of childbirth, the difficulty of working the soil, and the consumption of animals by humans, and of animals by animals, explained immediately.
But that only works if you see that story as literal truth. If you believe, as I happen to, in that story as being more of a true metaphor than a true history, then it is a way to reveal the difficult concept of free will and the tendency to use it against oneself, more than an explanation for those darker aspects of the design of our world.
Admittedly humans have interfered with nature historically, as Amy, a vet, comments to me, and seemingly we have never learned. Some apparent darknesses may have been caused, or exacerbated, by our actions causing change.
But other things have quite clearly been part of the design. We talk about a delicately balanced system, and part of that system involves death. There is a natural culling of certain species based on food supplies and predators, which would have been there, which would in fact have worked better, without our human interference.
My answer to this question is that the murkier aspects of nature, that blood and violence reveals a rather more intricate character of the artist, an understanding, perhaps that some of beauty is all the greater revealed by contrasting ugliness, the most joyful moments require a counterbalance of strife, or of toil to get to them. Do we perhaps need a food chain to learn to value its victims? Do we need to be part of one ourselves, prey as we are to bacteria, or natural disaster, in order to appreciate what we have when we have life?
It's a difficult question. But it is hard not to see the beauty in destruction. The crater is beautiful, an erupting volcano, though deadly, is also beautiful. The shark could kill me but his deadly grace is part of the privilege of seeing him.
If our world was created by a gigantic artist, then what kind of person must he or she be?
A complicated one. An understander and communicator of truths. Isn't that what all great artists are?
Why do we want our Gods so one dimensional? Which of us could be described as anything other than a multitude of contradictions?
There is beauty in great ugliness (just take a look at a marine iguana for proof). There is regeneration in destruction.
There is an art show out there which changes daily. Go and take a look before it alters again.
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